On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:
>> That doesn't completely match my experience. It's true that there is no
> guarantee that the ABI will stay compatible, but when you compile lxml
> against Py2.4 on a 32bit machine, it will continue to import in Py2.5 and
> (IIRC) Py2.6. It won't be as fast and it won't use some newer features, but
> it will work. Don't remember my experience with 2.3, though.
Importing fine is a very low expectation for ABI compatibility :)
Since python does not make ABI guarantees between minor releases, you
don't know whether some structures layouts are changed between
versions, and in general, tracking crashes due to those is no fun. It
really depends on how much you depend on the C API, but for something
extensive like NumPy, I don't think it would ever work.
So yes, you could say "just try and if it crashes, check that it is
not ABI-related". In practice, this is very poor engineering in my
book...
David